Back on my feet...

Stolen shamelessly from Gary Benfold.

A whole library of books?

"The Bible is not a book, but a whole library of books."

In recent years it has become more and more common to say that the Bible is not a single book, but a whole library of books. This assertion is sometimes put as if it were a new insight, and it is put strongly, combatively, as if it were very important, crucial to the battle for Christianity in the post modern world. 

At the heart of the assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with many voices that are to some degree in disagreement with each other.  Human authorship in its diversity leads inevitably to discordant voices, especially given the cultural, linguistic, chronological and geographical spread involved. 

The immediate effect of this is that the authority of any part of the scriptures can be waved away relatively easily. Not long ago, in a paper aimed at showing, say, that Romans 1 had nothing to say regarding modern homosexual relationships, attention was paid to the exact Greek words used and their interpretation. Now, with an acceptance that Jesus and Paul have essentially different messages, it is sufficient to classify the latter as the author of some "letters from 2000 years ago" and ditch him without further debate. If this is true of the Pauline corpus, how much more so of the older Testament...

The first thing that can be said about all this is that an awareness of diversity within Scripture isn't actually new at all. All careful students of the Bible, from Chrysostom to Calvin and up to the present, have observed that diversity of genre, cultural background and theological emphasis of the various writings. Indeed, good exegesis has been in large part precisely the struggle to interpret scripture in a way that does justice to its historical and diverse nature. It was understood that God had spoken through history in a progressive way and in diversified forms - a conviction that perhaps had its roots in Heb 1:1? - and that respect for that diversity was an essential key to hearing his voice. 

If there was a sea change in the thinking about the nature of scripture, it wasn't particularly recent. It was in the 19th century that scholars began to teach the human authorship of the Bible  in a way which downplayed or denied the divine element. It was in that period that the idea of incompatible theologies, of discordant voices, of irreconcilable differences between texts began to come in. Although lone voices had said some of these things before, the 19th century saw a new acceptability and broader consensus, at least in the universities, that scripture must be read in a way that effectively ruled out looking for a common thread of truth from a self-consistent God. Human authorship, not divine, became the sole principle governing interpretation. 

The recent development has been that such thinking has started to come into parts of the church which have been regarded as evangelical, and some of which still wish to regard themselves and be regarded as evangelical. That is new. It is part of a trend that has been going on for a while, with the goalposts continuously on the move, but this element represents a further stage of the outcropping of 19th century liberalism into mainstream, evangelical church life.  

This is a disaster. It would be hard to overstate the corrosive, poisonous effects of such a line of thought. It is destructive of Christian Faith at its very heart, makes preaching all but impossible, and leaves the church adrift on the chaotic cross-currents of postmodernity. Or, to put it another way, it is the intellectual leaders' desire to appease and to live happily with the postmodern world that is stealing the bread of heaven from the mouth of the congregations of believers. 

It doesn't square with Jesus' attitude to Scripture. 

If we allow that the gospel narratives paint in any way a coherent and authoritative picture of Jesus, then we have to take on board his attitude to the OT scriptures if we want to be his disciples.  (I am aware that there is a school of thought which denies any such coherence or historical authenticity to the gospels, but if we can't believe in that Jesus, then there is no Jesus who we can believe in and Christianity slips through our fingers completely.) 

One repeated motif of the gospels is Jesus' self-awareness as both being and achieving the fulfilment of the scriptures. Although at times it is the gospel narrator who sees an event happening "in fulfilment", at others the idea is put on Jesus' own lips. Perhaps the classic passage is Luke 24, where the resurrection is explained as being the fulfilment of Jesus' own words (6-8) but also as fulfilment of the OT scriptures. These are classically, Jewishly, classified into their three great divisions - Moses/Torah, Prophets and Psalms/Writings.  

Jesus sees those divisions as speaking with a united voice, and he sees himself as the subject of their message. He does not give a hint that Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms have different voices, or that they are of unequal value, or that one part speaks of him but others don't. He affirms that all the sections - indeed, "all the Scriptures" v27 cf. 45 - speak of him. In fact, in the light of v45 we can arguably go further - for Jesus and then for his disciples, to understand the scriptures is precisely to understand how, with one voice, they speak of him. 

Undergirding this understanding is the awareness that behind the human authors, in all their diversity of content, culture, genre and style, is a single Author, who reveals himself in a coherent, self-consistent and progressive way through the writings of many human authors. When Jesus speaks of the "Word of God" in Luke 11:28, whatever Christological resonances we may be tempted to find, our primary understanding must be that, like any Jew of his time, he is referring to the scriptures and to the  the Torah specifically. 

Such an attitude continues through from Jesus into the rest of the NT. For Jesus, "what Scripture says, God says" and his followers show the same attitude. To take just one example: the interplay of "authorship awareness" in Hebrews 3 and 4 is well-known. Here "it is said", "David said", "the Holy Spirit says" and "God spoke" swirl around one another in reference to the same texts. There is no felt clash between human authorship, in its historically conditioned singularity, and divine authorship, in its overarching coherence. 

The point is that Christian faith, being the faith that is centred on the person, words and work of Jesus, includes at its heart his own attitude to the OT scriptures. For Jesus to describe the OT as "a library of books" with a denial of a singular, overarching Authorship is simply impossible to imagine. This view parts company with Christian Faith because it parts company with Jesus himself. 

This "library of books" attitude to the Bible is more pervasive now than at any time I can remember. Its effects are all around us, even in the lips and in the behaviour of believers who might hesitate to articulate it directly. The impact can be seen in various, interlinked ways. 

1) With regard to the Bible itself, we are distanced from the weight of the text. 

The authority of scripture may still be affirmed in our Doctrines, but in practice it is now wholly absent. This is a direct outworking of this view - if the Bible has no one voice, no one message, then it really has nothing to say to us that we have to hear and heed, trust and obey. Any part can be set off against any other part, and we have become the final arbiters, ruling over the text and deciding what we want to obey. 

2) With regard to God, we have never been freer to shift our understanding of who he is.

I remember a young woman in Brazil telling me that her God was "fofinho" - fluffy and cuddly. That kind of view of God now pervades the church and even its candidates for ministry. The God who is "consuming fire" can be marginalised and then lost completely, for the texts that speak in that way are surely contradicted somewhere else! With a multi-voiced Bible we have a voiceless Bible, and we are free to redefine God in whatever way we like. Not for nothing did Don Carson title his great book on postmodernism in the church, "The Gagging of God" - a self-contradictory, multi-voiced book gives no voice to the Lord at all. Suddenly "God" is sounding strikingly similar to the rest of the flood of politically corrected, social-media-ready material. The God of scripture has been silenced, to be replaced by the filtered, sickly-sweet quotes from meme-gurus. 

3) With regard to ourselves, it makes us arrogant and intellectually lazy

The traditional task of the Christian teacher/preacher was a challenging one. The Bible is a complex book, and its interpretation is hard work. Our calling to that hard work began in faith, as we receive Christ and receive his understanding of the way the Scriptures speak of him. Believing that all Scripture is God-breathed and that it is able to make us wise for salvation in Jesus is a matter of faith, of course, but having taken that step of faith, hard, humble work lies ahead as we attempt to sit under the text and work out how it is speaking of him. Down through the centuries preachers and believing scholars can testify to the sweat and satisfaction of toiling at the Bible, and finding, in fellowship with great exegetes who have gone before, that there really is one message, one coherent Voice, one Subject, one Speaker.  

But now, we don't need to do that any more. We are at liberty to ignore - simply never read or refer to - whole swathes of the Bible that are deemed sub-christian. Our work is now easy, for all we have to do is regurgitate the attitudes of the politically corrected gospel week on week and never be disturbed or disturb anyone with tougher or more uncomfortable passages. 

What claims to be a movement driven by intellectual honesty ends up being the exact reverse. It is the excuse for not grappling with the book of God. And it is far more honest to say, "I don't fully understand this section" than to take on the lofty tones of the "scholar" and tell your congregation that a passage has nothing to say to us for it has nothing to do with Jesus or his message. The former way is humble ignorance; the latter is the height of arrogance. 

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We need a return to the Bible. To the Bible as a book that - yes - is complex and historically, culturally, geographically and humanly diverse, but which is also One Book for it comes from One God and speaks of One Saviour. And we need to rediscover that united text not as an intellectual curiosity but as the unique bearer of the Message which calls us to faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. May God help us! 

Two Secondhand Books

I have on my shelf two fairly old secondhand books. Each of them belonged to one of my great-grandfathers, and I think they say something about what they valued in life. 

My mother's mother's father had a copy of William Gurnall's "Christian in Complete Armour". The date of the edition is 1862. It has a decent binding, though not deluxe, and it has suffered over the years. It was originally the property of a Mr Williamson of Notting Hill (or at least, he was the first to put his name in it) but it was given to my great grandfather on 8th Sept 1920, as a present from a Mrs Thorpe of the Aged Pilgrims' Asylum in Camberwell. I am curious as to whether the book was a kind of official gift associated with some service rendered to the APA, if so, what had Grandad Carpenter done for them, and was Mrs Thorpe connected to, perhaps a daughter of, Mr Williamson?

Whatever the history of this copy of the book in my family, there is no doubt about the value of the work itself. William Gurnall was a Puritan minister from Kings Lynn who ministered for a long period at Lavenham in Suffolk. He remained in the Church of England after the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which lost him many friends amongst the 2000 and more who were forced out. It was during his ministry at Lavenham that he wrote the three volumes which became the full Christian in Complete Armour. John Newton,

Oswald Beaumont Carpenter
with Sainsbury's staff in 1899.

the slave trader turned pastor and hymn-writer (Amazing Grace, amongst others) said that if he could only have access to one book beside the Bible, he would choose Christian Armour. Charles Spurgeon said the work is "peerless and priceless; every line full of wisdom. The book has been preached over scores of times and is, in our judgment, the best thought-breeder in all our library." It is a book which has had wide appeal across doctrinal and denominational divides; when the Banner of Truth produced their abridged and modernised version in 1988 it was in part at the behest of and with a foreword by David Wilkerson, Pentecostal pastor and author of The Cross and the Switchblade. 

My grandad Brunker gained the book through marriage to Ruth Carpenter, daughter of Oswald Beaumont. I know he had read it, and valued it, as I have, although in my case not this copy which is possibly too fragile for comfortable reading. I am glad to have it because of family history and the evidence it shows of where my grandad and great grandad were at. 

The other book is a beautifully bound edition (1876) of the Methodist Hymn Book (or A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists). It too came into my family second hand (the second hand book thing is clearly deeply rooted with us, on both sides of the clan). It was originally given

as a presentation to a Mrs Slater on the occasion of her laying one of the memorial stones at the new Wesleyan Chapel, Etwall, Derbyshire in 1883. I think that this chapel was in effect an extension of an existing building. In the book a Leicester address has been crossed through From what I can tell, Slaters were quite prominent people in the Leicestershire Methodist scene, hence her being asked to lay a foundation stone, I guess. 

The only other address is in St Albans Road, Watford and dated 1897. I have always assumed that this is in my great grandfather John King's handwriting and was his address, but I can't be sure. I know that he lived further into London, in the Hornsey Rise area, and that his son, my grandad, subsequently lived in Watford. 

What interests me with this book is that my great grandfather had it at all. He was a Gospel Standard Strict Baptist, and strictly speaking this Arminian volume should have been on his naughty shelf. But I love it! I think it is one of the greatest collections of hymns ever put together, and for anyone interested in Charles Wesley's hymns, as given a light editorial tweak by his brother, it is still an invaluable source. And I often wonder if John King actually looked on the hymns here with as much affection as I do, even though it would have been anathema in the chapels where he preached. Certainly my grandparents loved this book and its contents, and I am so glad to now have it in my care. 

If you are from a family with generations of believers, be glad. Value anything which connects you to your godly forbears. Above all, value the common faith, the common gospel, the common Spirit, the common Saviour and the common Lord. Be thankful for your ancestors' prayers - though you may have had no overlap with their lives, who said they didn't pray for generations yet unborn? And why not pray for your as yet unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren too? And ask yourself: What loved books or other evidences of a real faith may one day pass from you to them?

I am thankful for Oswald Beaumont Carpenter and John King. Without them, I wouldn't be here. 

In more ways than one. 

Weakness

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

We are surrounded by images of perfection. Beautiful people, fit bodies, lovely homes, successful careers, fulfilling relationships, happy families. Such images are used to sell us every kind of product, and those who present ideas and ideologies, parties and movements, had better come up to standard. 

Christianity is shockingly counter-cultural at this point. We worship a despised, rejected, crucified God who called a motley bunch of men to be his first spokespeople. They in turn struggled and suffered, both with persecution and illness. None appears to have had a comfortable, ideal life. Their relationships with one another were not without incident - rows and misunderstandings occurred, partnerships broke up, and they saw many colleagues fail and drop out. But through them the church took root across Europe and further afield. 

Christianity holds before us the greatest ideals of all. It presents us with the eternal hope of perfection. But on the way there, its followers and its preachers suffer persecution, they are subject to tiredness and illness, they are attacked by the devil and many temptations, and they are not, in this life, ever free of sin. (I realise that the last clause is not in sync with SA Doctrine 10 as read in accordance with the Founders' intentions. As one retired DC said to me, that doctrine is unbiblical. It is the main obstacle to my involvement as a soldier.) 

We create intolerable tensions and pressures in the church when we import the world's model of "perfection" - young, fit, shiny, beautiful - into our expectations and ministry. In the SA it may be the greater expectations of those with an impeccable Army pedigree and who look good in uniform. In the reformed scene of my background it was, to quote a former boss, "a perfectionist view of sanctification with a worthless worm view of salvation". Whether the drivers are sub-cultural or theological, we place ourselves under a terrible burden. 

We are not helped by the tradition of Christian biography which glosses over the weaknesses or even moral failings of great leaders of the past. Sometimes we are not even allowed to see them as people of their time. It took a long time before I could come to terms with Martin Luther as an anti-Semite, John Wesley as having a terrible marriage, George Whitfield as a slave-holder, William Wilberforce as a racist and so on. And it isn't just the more moral or ethical weaknesses that are missed; we may be familiar with William Cowper as suicidally depressed, but we may be less conscious of mental frailty when we think about John Bunyan, Lord Shaftesbury, Amy Carmichael, CS Lewis or Martyn Lloyd-Jones. And yet we know in experience that Christians we have known who we have admired greatly have been real people - sometimes clearly proud, or tetchy, or down, or selfish or whatever, and subject to the prejudices and blind spots of the prevailing general and church culture.

I am not trying to tone down the shock and disastrous impact of my own serious sin by saying that in some way we are all the same. Not at all. But I do think that the expectation of perfection makes it so much harder to talk openly about weakness and temptation - and the brittleness and precariousness that such lack of mutual support produces makes a truly disastrous fall that much more likely. If one is scared to talk about any weakness in marriage, any struggles with personal prayer or devotion, any tendency to anxiety or depression - if there is a fear that admission of ANY problem could be career-threatening - then the stage is set for a very lonely walk deeper and deeper into the ravine of danger. 

God has seen fit to use the weak things of this world. He uses the flawed, the hurt, the fragile. Illness, depression, insecurities, struggles, temptations and persecutions are the norm, not disqualifications. He reaches the broken through the broken - broken people who speak of the Crucified through the Spirit and so become strong for the task in hand. But supermen they are not. Mutual care which acknowledges that will help us stand; mutual care that pretends we are above failure will contribute to our destruction.

It is an amazingly alleviating thing to let go of the need to appear strong and perfect. It is such a relief to get the mask off after years of worries when it occasionally slipped. It is wonderful to rediscover the honesty of grace, and to acknowledge weakness and failure, and still to press on, trying to live for Jesus and point people to Jesus.



On this day... construction commenced on the Bethesda orphanage

On this day in 1740, work began on George Whitfield's orphanage project in the state of Georgia.

Another good example of the great tradition of social concern going hand in hand with word-based evangelism.

For further information, read here.

The Prosperity Gospel Light

Photo: Sarah King

 Anyone who lives in South London can see them. I mean the churches which offer transformation of life style. "Dream bigger!" say the posters outside the House of Praise in Camberwell. They show beautiful people dreaming of larger homes and better jobs - my dad's first reaction to them was that "dream bigger" referred to "thinking bigger and longer term than worldly goods". The true explanation rather shocked him.  

Anyone who has lived in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America has seen the same thing on a far larger scale. Massive churches promise health and prosperity to the faithful - the faithful being those who give sacrificially into church funds. Some churches operate on a franchise basis: the planter/pastor will get rich, so why shouldn't he pay for the right to use the organisation's branding and support? Money coming into a local church pays the pastor, but a significant proportion goes to the area bishop, and so on up a chain. At the top of the tree of these pyramidal churches the fat cat pastors swan it in their palaces, often living outside the countries where their money is collected. Those who pay for their luxury are the poorest of the poor, sold a dream of miraculous wealth, and fleeced of the little they have in the process.  

In order to keep people and money coming in, there have to be believable testimonies about sudden cash windfalls and the like. Money must appear in a bank account; a new car has to be left outside a member's home; a medical bill is mysteriously paid. Some such "miracles" are needed, and the testimonies will be duly milked in the church's meetings and on its TV shows. (In Brazil the country's second largest national TV network is wholly owned by its largest prosperity church.)

Engineering miracles (let alone producing TV shows!) represents a drain on resources, of course, but then, once a church has parted company with integrity in smaller matters, why not go the whole way? In countries full of corruption and organised crime, what better way is there of money laundering than the offering box of a church? Handling drug money and even running guns become less talked-about aspects of "ministry" that keep the whole ship afloat. 

"Solomon's Temple"
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in São Paulo, Brazil

In many countries such "prosperity" churches are inextricably linked with corrupt politics and organised crime. That mixing and interconnectedness is one of the greatest evils in the world today. It used to be an embarrassment to see the great gilt edifices of the Roman church towering over the slums of Latin America; nowadays the image of Latin Catholicism is often of the hard working priest or lay worker identifying with the poor, while the disgrace is all "evangelical".
 

The history of the prosperity gospel is not totally straightforward to trace. From the Christian side, the man-centredness of post-Finney and post-Sunday Arminianism have been mixed into a cocktail with the hyper-realised eschatology of some kinds of Pentecostalism. But there are also elements which come from outside any kind of Christian tradition - African animism in Africa and Brazil, or folk Buddhism in SE Asia. 

Most people in mainstream church traditions in the UK would distance themselves from the worst manifestations of such teaching. In the Salvation Army, a tradition of hands-on concern for the poor makes the abuse of the marginalised especially distressing. (Although I understand that in parts of Africa, the SA is not totally free of Prosperity teaching.) 

But some of the roots of the problem may be with us nonetheless. We are a church where rescue and transformation of life has always been at the heart of our ministry and of our joy. The Salvation Army has aimed to reach people mired in the worst economic, social and moral difficulties with the gospel of eternal life, and has rejoiced to see believers receive not only hope of life for eternity but also significant social and economic transformation as the outworking of a new life in Jesus. 

That kind of transformation has been celebrated in our tradition of meetings through opportunity for testimony. We encourage believers to say what God has done for them, and in the process hear not only of forgiveness of sin and eternal hope, but of liberation from all kinds of slavery and misery.

God's gospel changes people. Turning from sin to Christ has repercussions on so many levels. The drinker suddenly has more resources and better health. The wife beater regains a marriage and begins to see his children respect him. The addict is able to hold down her job. Iliterate people learn and are helped to read - firstly for the book of God, but then find themselves more employable as a result. How many thousands of people in the history of Salvationism have walked such a road? It is the glory of the movement!

But there is a peril in that, and especially given our tradition of testimonies. There is a distinction between the gospel itself and the results of the gospel which can all too easily be lost. The testimony "I came to Jesus and my life got so much better" seems only inches away from a proclamation, "Come to Jesus and your life will get so much better." 

Many churches around the world would recoil from a message which is in effect, "give us your money and you will get rich". But in these same churches, the message "come to Jesus and your life will get better" is actually the standard gospel. It is not preached as crassly, it is not linked to the lifestyle of fat cat pastors, it isn't tied in with political corruption, but in its own way it is a prosperity gospel. I call it the Prosperity Gospel Light. We can say a number of things about it:

·         It is not biblical. The apostolic preaching never invites people to meet Jesus. The book of Acts has repeated examples of sermons where, in effect, the hearers are told that they will meet Jesus. The challenge is to respond now in a way which demonstrates seriousness about that future meeting. In that response - repentance and faith - transformations begin, and they go on as the new believer begins to work out their new life in the Spirit. 

·         It limits the audience for the gospel. A message which constantly focuses on "your life is tough - come to Jesus and your problems will be solved" can never reach anyone who actually has an enjoyable or easy life at the present. Sure, all of us have difficulties from time to time, but dare we risk limiting our message to the troubled? Paul in Acts 14 effectively preaches to the happy: "You have sun and rain and harvest and food and joy and family and fun - but are you giving thanks for all that good stuff where thanks are due?" That is a point of entry to people's hearts which seems natural to the apostle - but is not often heard in our evangelism today. 

·         It promises what it can't deliver. The New Testament never promised freedom from problems for believers. For sure, some problems that arise from specific sins will go. If you drink a bottle of spirits a day and then stop, lots of stuff will certainly improve. But other problems may not be related to such bad habits or sins at all. Illness, accident, injustice, persecution, unemployment - Christians suffer these things too. We dare not promise what the gospel cannot and does not set out to deliver. I am convinced that the enormous numbers of people who have left the churches on the basis that "Christianity doesn't work" have done so principally because the "christianity" that they have been exposed to was never going to work as its promises and premise were false. 

·         It detracts from Jesus. When "coming to Jesus" has become all about the various material and present-era benefits that flow from knowing him, it does cast doubt on the nature of knowing him at all. That would be true even of other human relationships: since I married Sarah my life has been transformed in so many ways - amazing cooking for one! This was quite predictable - and yet if I had said to myself before marriage, "I should marry Sarah because my life will be changed by her amazing cooking" then I would have had a problem. I married her for her, herself, and other benefits are a byproduct. That has to be the same for Jesus, or Christianity has ceased to be about a relationship with him and has become a self-help exercise with his name attached. 

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The Salvation Army, more than any other church I have known, has a glorious history of reaching people who are on the fringe, on the margins, in the mire, and helping them put their feet on the Rock. This is its glory, but also its Achilles heel IF that tradition draws the church away from preaching the Bible's Jesus and towards any kind of prosperity gospel. As ever, survival, growth and revival have to start with rediscovery of our roots - in this case roots in the apostolic preaching itself. 

Who's afraid...

If my last post expressed disquiet at the state of belief and preaching amongst us;  this one is to say that we needn't be afraid or depressed. Local churches and movements (the Salvation Army included) may come and go, but Christ's church will be built and nothing can stop him! 

Be relieved. Be confident. Be bold.